


a thousand days, a thousand ways

by elsaclack



Series: meandering thoughts of a hopeless romantic [3]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, One-Shot Series, Originally Posted on Tumblr, kiss prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-03-09 23:45:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 17,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13492344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsaclack/pseuds/elsaclack
Summary: the first, the last, and every one in between





	1. "i'll be right back" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I’ll be right back” kisses:_ A puts their hands on B’s shoulders from behind them, where they are sat on the couch. A leans down and around, while B turns their head a little, accepting the quick peck.

The rain comes quick and heavy that night.

The weather portion of the local news takes up over half of the hour block; Jake watches, only half-way paying attention, as their weatherman stands on a corner made blurry by the rain shouting into a microphone about rapidly dropping temperatures and flash flood warnings. The weatherman’s pinkened face is only just visible beneath the bright blue station-branded raincoat cinched tight around his torso, and somewhere behind him, Amy’s making tacos.

(They’ve been engaged a month and Charles has insisted on giving them both cooking lessons so they don’t up and kill each other once they’re legally husband and wife, and even though Amy’s got a long way to go just to catch up to where Jake started, he’d be lying if he said she didn’t make some seriously good tacos.)

Her voice made jagged with irritation sails clearly over the thunder cracking outside their windows, and for the first time since he sat down here two hours ago Jake cranes his head around to peer into the kitchen. She’s stood before the stove where a pan of something he can’t quite see is sizzling, hands on her hips, hair thrown up in a messy bun starting to come unraveled in those crazy fly-away tufts he loves so much. “Babe?” he calls hesitantly.

(He loves her more than life itself but she might have a slight tendency to bite his entire head off when she’s frustrated.)

“I forgot the seasoning when I went to the store earlier,” she says without looking around, and the way she says is the way he would expect to hear her say she’d forgotten to respond to an invitation to tea with the Queen. He almost laughs.

Almost.

“Aw, hon, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, I’ll just go get some from the bodega around the corner.”

She’s halfway to the door before he processes what she’s saying. “Wait - you’re going outside?”

She pauses, an outstretched hand gripping her raincoat where it hangs on a hook by the door. “Yeah?”

“Ames, it’s -” he gestures to the television, where the Doppler Radar shows a brightly-colored red-hued blob moving swiftly through New York City. “It’s like Day After Tomorrow out there right now. You can’t just go walk to the bodega to get some taco seasoning -”

She scoffs. “Says you, wimp.” He falls back into the cushions, dead-panned, as she shrugs her jacket on and zips the zipper up to her chin. “Keep an eye on the meat and don’t let anything burn.”

“Fine, but if you’re freezing cold when you get back here, I’m not gonna cuddle with you. I don’t care how much you look like a drowning kitten.”

Hands slide up over the curves of each shoulder, and then the heat of her face washes over the right side of his face. “You’ll cuddle with me and you’ll  _love it_.” she whispers directly in his ear.

His resistance is only momentarily successful. “Your toes are gonna be so cold on my legs…” he sighs, before turning his head and briefly closing his eyes.

It’s more of a peck than a kiss, but his heart flutters all the same. “I’ll be right back,” she says as she backs toward the door. “And don’t forget about watching the food!”

(She’s even colder than he imagined she’d be when she returns ten minutes later, and even though they eat while huddled together beneath three blankets, she still falls asleep shivering while the storm rages on outside.)


	2. "i missed you" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> <“I missed you” kisses: Long and relentless, holding their body close, arms wrapped completely around their waist. A burying their head in B’s neck and pressing kisses there too.

Here’s the thing: being reunited with the love of your life after a really long absence is not nearly as badass as the movies make it seem.

When he imagined coming home - and god did he imagine it a billion different ways - he pictured long days spent in one of their apartments, filled with hazy lighting and long, drawn-out makeout sessions. He pictured maybe walking through the farmers market while holding hands, or else scouring the internet looking for apartment listings, or maybe even checking out local pet stores for cats eligible for adoption.

He most decidedly did not picture hobbling through Amy’s kitchen with a crutch shoved up into his armpit, struggling to uncap the lid to his painkillers, while the love of his life, the beautiful wonderful perfect woman of his dreams, lies face-down and snoring on the couch.

Yeah, not quite the  _Die Hard_  ending he imagined in that disgusting Floridian bachelor pad he was forced to call home for six months.

It’s not Amy’s fault. Not really, at least. Okay, technically it is Amy’s fault - that he’s hobbling around on crutches and also that she’s asleep right now - but really, he doesn’t blame her. She did what she had to do to get him and Holt back, and if god forbid their roles had been reversed, he would have done the exact same thing. So he understands, on an objective level, that this isn’t necessarily her fault, or anyone’s fault, other than Figgis.

That doesn’t quite chase away the ache in his chest, though.

It’s the same ache (though far and away less intense) that plagued him the moment the car took him and Holt away from the precinct six months earlier. It’s empty and painful, a gaping wound not unlike the one in his thigh that just refuses to heal. And it dimmed, it really dimmed, when he saw her face for the first time in months in that dingy and humid little storage unit, and dimmed further still when she kissed him in the back of that ambulance, but the truth his it almost feels like he hasn’t even really seen her since.

And suddenly he understands with an intense intimacy the old phrase, two ships passing in the night.

It sucks, but he’s gonna grin and bear it no matter how long it takes - because eventually his leg will be healed and he’ll be cleared to go back into the field and then they’ll be in the night shift trenches together, and everything wil be one step closer to normal.

Just as soon as his damn leg heals.

The snoring tapers off at some point while he’s rationing out painkillers from the little orange pill bottles on Amy’s windowsill, and it’s while he’s downing the second one that he hears her footsteps shuffling around the doorway, the door frame creaking as she leans against it. She snuffles out a yawn as he lowers the now-empty glass into the sink, and when he turns, she’s rubbing the sleep out of one eye. “Hey,” she rasps.

Warmth floods his chest. “Hi,” he breathes back, one hand on the counter, the other wrapped tight around the support bar on his crutch. “Sleep okay?”

She was only out for five hours at most, so when she grunts and shrugs non-noncommittally he has to resist the urge to frown. “Last night was brutal,” she murmurs, pushing up off of the door frame to move further into the kitchen. “Did you eat already?”

“‘Bout an hour ago,” he nods, watching the vague concern flickering in her eyes be snuffed out with reassurance. He’s not supposed to take his painkillers on an empty stomach. “What was so brutal about it?”

“I don’t - just,” she stops, heaves a sigh, and rolls her shoulders. Beneath her shirt stolen from his apartment he can see the tension drawing her muscles inward, knotted and tight. “I don’t know,” she finally says, turning away from the cabinet into which she was looking to lean back against the counter, looking at him head-on. “Charles and I got called to a liquor store where this sixteen-year-old was clearly drunk and trying to steal a case of beer but was swearing that she was put up to it, and then she yarfed all over Charles’ pants and I drove so now my car smells like a drunken sixteen-year-old’s hangover, and…” she trails, eyes fixated on the edge of her counter, where her finger is tracing the edge. “And, y’know, it - everything sucks a whole lot more than it would when you’re not there.”

He can feel himself opening, blossoming, the sudden shy display of her vulnerability bringing his own out almost instinctively. “Are you saying you miss me?” he asks, half-joking, half-serious.

She considers him through her lashes. “Yeah,” she finally murmurs.

It’s not as fast as he’d like it to be, or as forceful, but he hobbles to her as quickly as he can and backs her up into the counter all the same. The crutch falls from beneath his arm but neither of them pay it any mind, Amy’s desperate little whine lost beneath the loud clatter of metal hitting tile. He tries to be careful not to put any weight on his bad leg but it doesn’t matter in the end - he’s so caught up in the relief of having her like this, of holding her and kissing her and remembering just how heart-stopping and incredible their kisses are that he can’t even really feel the pain beyond a dull throb.

(Perhaps in reality it’s the painkillers masking it all - but he doesn’t have the time to spare that any real thought.)

Her hands are desperate and seeking, tangled up in his newly-shortened frosted-tip-free curls, and as their kiss quickly deepens her breaths become sharper and more ragged through her nose. He doesn’t remember when but somehow his arms wound up wrapped tight around her waist, and if he could hold any weight on his bad leg he’d lift her up off her feet; as it is he merely pulls his face away, gasping once for air, before diving back in to bury his face in her neck.

“I miss you, Jake,” Amy gasps as he lines her neck with kisses, and he can’t hold back a quiet groan, spurred by her voice and the feel of her fingers buried in his hair. He knows he can’t stay like this forever, the pain is beginning to build slowly but surely in his bad leg and Amy has a shift she has to get to soon, but he clings to her tighter, kisses her shoulder harder, silently begs whatever divine entity is listening to let them stay this way forever.

But eventually the intensity passes and their breathing returns to normal, and the fingers so hopelessly tangled in his hair begin to stroke and soothe in controlled, even motions.

So maybe they can’t stay exactly this way forever, he thinks as he draws in a slow, shuddering inhale to fill his lungs with the scent of her perfume. But they will have some sort of forever. Someday.


	3. "come to bed" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Come to bed” kisses:_ A has their hands on B’s neck, murmuring the phrase softly. A’s hands slide down B’s arms to their hands, lacing their fingers together and slowly starting to pull B towards their bedroom. A continues to pepper B with kisses all the while, trailing them down their jaw and neck.

The accent light above their kitchen table casts an almost eerie halo around her intense curls.

Well, it’s either that or the manic gleam in her glazed and blood-shot eyes - either way, Jake finds himself hovering in the doorway, watching her hunch over their kitchen table, her nose just inches from the pages of her study guide.

It’s just one of the twenty-some-odd books open and scattered across their table, random lines highlighted a myriad of colors in a system that only makes sense in the crazed and scrambled mind of the woman before him.

The woman he loves. The woman who is very likely going to make herself go bald from all the stress-braiding she’s been doing as of late.

“Ames?” he says her name softly, cautiously, but she still jumps so violently her pencil bag tips over, sending highlighters and pens cascading down and across the floor at her feet. “Sorry, sorry -”

He rushes forward just as she drops to her knees, frantically sweeping the pens up from where they’ve rolled beneath the table. Within seconds he’s handing her a bundle of pens, watching the way her eyes dart around like a trapped animal, practically snatching the pens from his hands and spreading them across the single blank spot between study guides as she perches on the edge of her seat.

She never once looks him in the eye.

Logic is telling him that she’s a grown woman and is capable of making her own decisions, but instinct has his worry flaring up at the visible tenseness making her neck twitch. “Amy,” he says firmly, pulling himself up to his feet with a grip on the back of her chair, trying not to take her flinching and shrinking away from him personally. “You have to come to bed.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Babe,  _please_ ,” he drops down to one knee and shuffles closer, trying to force himself into her line of sight. “It’s two o’clock in the morning and we have to be at work in seven hours. You’ve been studying non-stop for over eight hours now,” she hums, high-pitched and thin, eyes still fixated on her study guide. “Please come to bed?”

Still, no response.

So he heaves a sigh and then himself back up to his feet again, shuffling around so that he stands behind her, his head casting a shadow over the back of her head from the angle of the accent light. It takes a little digging and a little gentle rearranging but he manages to burrow his hands down through her hair to the back of her neck. The cords of muscle are tight and knotted beneath the pads of his thumbs, so as gently as he can, he begins to rub small circles right in the space where her neck meets her shoulders.

“Jake,” he hears her murmur, and her voice is hoarse and cracked from lack of use. He just presses harder, and harder still when her head drops just slightly to allow him better access.

“Come to bed,” he murmurs back, taking his time to work his fingers over her shoulders, lingering there until she’s at least a little bit more loose than before. “Come to bed, babe, please.”

“I have to keep studying,” she almost whimpers, lifting a hand to gesture pitifully at the books still spread out before her. “If I don’t pass this lieutenant’s exam -”

“You’re gonna ace it, Ames,” he interrupts gently, pressing down against a knot in the flesh of her back, near her left shoulder. She does whine that time, leaning forward in her seat with her hands bracing against the edge of the table. “You would’ve aced it before the studying, too. Just come to bed with me. Please?”

He hears her swallow, watches her bow her head so that her forehead rests briefly against the closest study guide, before she lifts her head and turns it back just slightly to peer at him through her lashes. “Can I bring one of the study guides?”

She sounds so tired, so close to the edge of sleep. So he heaves a little sigh and smooths one palm down her spine, warm and gentle, hardly any pressure at all. “Only one,” he says seriously, and when she nods her eyelids droop wearily.

He ends up plucking the study guide she chooses out of her hands, tucking it up under his arm and linking their hands together when she goes to reach for it. “Not ‘til you’re in pajamas and in bed,” he says, doing his best to maintain a stern expression even though her pout is unfairly adorable. Ultimately he fails; he peppers light kisses across her face and even down onto her neck as he guides her out of the kitchen and toward their bedroom.

She’s changed and in bed within minutes, and when he hands her the study guide she accepts it with a soft, tired smile. And he’s proud of himself, because someday soon he’s going to propose to her and now she’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’ll take care of her, even when she’s sure that she doesn’t need to be taken care of.

(He can’t stop the insane braiding or the creepy singing, but even as he smashes his pillow down over his ears to block some of the noise out he breathes easily knowing she’s at the very least going to fall asleep while studying in a bed rather than at a kitchen table. It’s not perfect, but he still counts it as a victory.)


	4. comforting kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Comforting kisses:_ B walks into find A sitting on the bed, shoulders shaking, cheeks wet. A looks up, face looking stricken for a moment. B is shocked, and quietly says A’s name. At this, A breaks, face crumpling, and only barely has time to reach both hands out for B before B is there, kneeling at A’s feet. B takes A’s hands first, kissing their knuckles and palms. Then B reaches up to hold A’s face, pressing soft kisses around their cheeks, their lips, murmuring “it’s okay” and “you’re alright” and “I’m here” in between.

He didn’t get there quick enough.

It’s the only thought his mind can fully process as he sits in the parking garage, his car idling, the engine running just a little bit rough beneath the hood. It makes the whole frame of the car shake, which sends this uncomfortable pricking tingling sensation up his legs from where his feet are planted, which reaches all the way up to his blood-stained hands.

Almost made it. Almost got there in time. But not quite.

Not quite.

It’s not the first time he’s seen the life leave a person’s eyes. Not by a long shot. But unlike shattered windows or families shaken by home burglaries or missing family members, he just hasn’t quite gotten used to that. To seeing someone die.

He hopes he never will.

What did it, though, what pushed him over the edge, was coming out of the house to see the victim’s husband on the sidewalk. To hear those broken, raw, animalistic sobs. To hear the mourning and the grieving echoing off the buildings across the street. To see the man dissolve completely on the sidewalk, reduced to nothing more than a hollow shell of a human whose entire essence has been ripped mercilessly away.

All because the woman inside is not ever going to walk back out again.

All because Jake was just a few minutes too late.

It’s unhealthy to blame himself, he knows that on an objective level. And he’s sure that after some time passes and the pain of it all has gotten just a little bit less intense, the husband would tell him that he doesn’t blame him at all. After all, Jake’s not the one who shot his wife. Jake’s not the one who left her there.

But still.

He’s been sitting here in his car for the last ten minutes, letting the engine idle, wondering when the feeling is going to return to his limbs. His heart is thudding in his chest and his phone vibrates with an incoming text where it sits in the cup holder; when he glances down, he recognizes the new text icon, the shape of Amy’s name right beside it.

Amy.

They have a meeting with a florist later this afternoon to decide what kind of flowers they want lining the aisle leading to the archway, and then after that they’re supposed to go by the jeweler’s so they can double check that his ring fits properly. Because in less than two months they’re going to get married, and Amy’s going to be his wife, and he’s going to be so hopelessly entangled in her life that without her he’ll never be whole again.

Amy.

He’s out of his car and into the building and up the stairs and into the bullpen, moving so fast but unaware of the way it’s affecting his body. He can hear this grating noise that he thinks might be him gasping for air and he can feel this burn in his throat the same way he might feel someone else coughing in his chest; all of it, everything is a blur until he’s shoving through the beat cops standing at the bullpen gate and catching sight of Amy, his fiancee, sitting at her desk and staring at her computer.

There’s someone standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, someone who might be Charles or Rosa or maybe even Terry, he can’t really see them. Jake just stumbles forward until his fingers are wrapped hard around the back of her visitor’s chair, yanking it out of his way as he drops to his knees beside her and grabs haphazardly at her face.

She’s stiff with shock when he kisses her. And all at once, his surroundings catch up with him.

Whatever the volume of noise was when he first walked in has dimmed significantly now, and over the quiet chuckles coming from the outskirts of the room he can hear Charles sighing dreamily and Rosa quietly retching somewhere over his head. None of it makes any sense to him - they should all be trembling, just like him.

Amy’s hands are on his face and she’s pushing, pushing him away, and he very nearly rips at her wrists to keep her from getting away from him. “ _Damn_ , Peralta,” Rosa mutters, “get a grip.”

Amy yanks back with a harsh smack of their lips, her entire face twisted in bewilderment.

He inhales through his mouth, reaching to stabilize himself with a grip on the edge of her desk.

The bewilderment quickly morphs into concern.

“Jake?” He’s still heaving for breath as she slides out of her seat, and now she’s on her knees, too, both of her hands still on his face, holding him gently. He can feel it coming - the hurricane - but he holds onto this last little scrap of sanity as tightly as he holds the edge of her desk, staring down at the tiles beneath their knees. “Jake, look at me.” Amy urges softly.

He does.

And she has the good sense to pull him up to his feet and guide him over to the briefing room, sensing the impending explosion, understanding the unspoken need for privacy. And as soon as he’s slumped down in a chair and the doors close he reaches for her with both hands, too pitiful to voice what he wants but unwilling to go even a moment longer without her touch.

She’s there at once, kneeling at his feet, both of his hands clutched tight in hers. He knows he’s a blubbering mess right now but he can’t stop himself, only crying harder when she lifts his hands up and quickly kisses along his knuckles and against both palms before rising up on her knees and shuffling closer, between his knees so that the edge of his chair presses against her stomach. She moves his hands to her waist and then reaches up to touch his face again, smoothing her thumbs across his cheeks to wipe away the tears raining down toward his jaw.

“It’s okay,” she whispers before pressing two kisses in quick succession against his right cheek. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s over now,” down his jaw and then up to the corner of his mouth, and when she presses a kiss to his lips it tastes salty. “Sh, Jake, you’re okay. I’m right here, honey, you’re okay.”

She keeps this up for a while, until he’s tapered off more into hiccups, his palms flat and fingers splayed along her sides. From there she tucks his head down against her shoulder, the edge of her jaw resting against the back of his head, one hand stationary against his face while the other strokes his hair and the back of his neck.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” she says eventually, a gentle kind of understanding softening her voice to a near-whisper. “But if you want or need to talk about it, I’m all ears.”

He blinks blearily, sniffles, and pulls her in a little closer. “Not yet,” he finally says thickly around the knot of tears still sitting heavy in his throat. “Maybe tonight.”

He feels her nod, and then pull her head back to kiss the top of his head. “Whatever you need,” she murmurs.

He pulls back to look her in the eye, finding her gaze to be a little bloodshot, like maybe seeing him so emotional made her emotional, too. “You,” he says, and that little bewildered crease appears between her brows. “You’re what I need,” he clarifies, and her face smooths over. “You’re the only thing I’m ever gonna need.”

She stays quiet, eyes wide as they rove over his face.

“I love you so much more than I could ever really say, y’know?” he whispers, and though his vision is blurry with another wave of tears he can see a new, glistening sheen to her gaze. “I really do. I love you so much, Ames.  _So_ much.”

She reschedules their appointments and they go home early, and when he’s on the couch with his arms around her waist and his head on her chest, he tells her - haltingly - about the woman who died in her living room and the man whose whole life ended on the sidewalk just outside.


	5. "i thought i lost you" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I thought I lost you” kisses:_ The breath is knocked out of both of them with the force that they collide with. Hands grip the back of t-shirts and palms are pressed up and under shirts, holding them close, feeling the warmth of their skin. Palms are pressed to cheeks, thumbs swiping away tears until their mouths collide messily, the world seeming to disappear around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let’s call this,,,,,a hunger games au?? i?? guess?? honestly idk what the hell it is but it’s like ur typical Teenagers Fighting The Evil Government Figure/Force And Saving The World: Post-Final Battle Scene AU

Jake wakes up alone, gasping for air, staring up at the grey steel ceiling he recognizes as the hospital bay. The thin cushion beneath his back and the freezing cold guardrail pressed against his arm only further confirm that suspicion; as the initial shock of jerking awake begins to fade, he registers the tubes taped to his face and the pulse monitor beeping slowly and demurely above his head.

He’s in the hospital bay.

Which begs the question: how the hell did he even get here?

His memory is dicey at best, images and sounds coming back in disconnected pieces - distant gunshots popping in his ears, windows bursting from the pressure of flames licking along the walls five stories above his head, helicopters roaring as they soared by above, bodies motionless on the ground beneath his feet. And the smoke and debris that filled the air and his lungs alike, further shrouding the places already hidden in shadows and casting an eerie glow to the fires raging around every corner.

He’s not sure what the last thing he remembers is. He’s not really even sure that he remembers anything. But there’s an ache, a burn to his muscles as he begins to move beneath this starchy blanket, that suggests whatever his scrambled mind is trying to recall might very well be what landed him here.

And if he ended up here…

Fear, white-hot and alive, pulses through his chest.

The automatic door slides open with a long, loud warning tone when he yanks the pulse monitor off his finger and tries to sit up, and his lower back spasms painfully just as two nurses come rushing inside. “Jake,” the one nearest to his head - Gina, he realizes distantly - grabs his flailing arm and tries to ease him back down again. “Calm down -”

“Where - where’s -” he stops, gasping in pain, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out. His shoulders make contact with the gurney and he pries his eyes open, finding Gina’s face inches from his own, ablaze with concern. “Where’s Amy?”

Gina blinks, and at the foot of the bed the other nurse whose name he’ll never know reaches beneath the gurney for the security straps he knows are dangling from the metal frame. “Santiago?” Gina asks, as if she’s clarifying - and it occurs to the part of his brain still concerned with things like his relationship with Amy being a secret sets off a warning light that goes completely ignored.

“Where  _is she_ , Gina?” he demands rather harshly, bending his knees up quickly to yank his feet out of the other nurse’s grasp.

Gina’s brows are furrowed, mouth hanging open, and through his still-open door he hears a distant, familiar voice twisted with a frantic energy, sounding two breaths away from completely panicking.

In a flash he’s on his feet and past Gina and the other nurse, the tubes ripped from his face and his feet bare and unsteady along the hospital bay floor. Gina’s hot on his heels and the other healers are looking around at the commotion, looking alarmed, torn between whatever scene is unfolding on the other side of the bay and him, the half-dead patient trying to escape medical care.

If he felt any more sane, he might laugh.

But he’s not laughing when he stumbles around that last corner and sees her, bloodied and bruised and looking to be on the verge of coming completely undone, pleading with a healer who stands a solid foot taller than her currently trying to herd her into a room to her right. There are tears cutting through the smoke and grime and dried blood caked on her face, tears that match the ones now falling down his own face, but the moment she catches sight of him sprinting toward her around the doctor’s right side she’s running, too.

And when they collide, the breath is knocked right out of his lungs - not just from the force of it all.

She smells like smoke and gunpowder and when he grips the back of her jacket in his fist the fabric almost crunches in his fist, so dry and brittle from the fires that raged outside. Her hands are on his back, sliding down and then up again, forgoing the shirt to press into his skin - and he wonders, briefly, if she’s checking for injuries.

“Oh my god,” she moans, and the realization that she’s outright sobbing into his shoulder hits him  _hard_. “Oh my god, oh my  _god_ , I - I thought -”

She doesn’t finish her sentence - he doesn’t need her to.

“Me too,” he whispers, lips caught on her shoulder, the words so quiet he’s certain only she can hear him.

“You were - you were right there, and then the bomb went off and - and you were  _gone_ -”

He screws his eyes shut and holds her a little tighter, willing the  _what-ifs_  and the  _could-have-beens_  and the  _almost-weres_  away. “Can’t shake me that easy, Santiago,” he mumbles, and a little halfhearted laugh-sob escapes her throat.

They stay like that a moment longer before he reaches for her face, swiping his thumbs across her cheeks, smearing the dirt as he goes - and then she’s on her tip-toes and her arms are draped over his shoulders, curled around his neck, holding him close. And their audience disappears, their injuries disappear, the whole world around them disappears - all that remains is this, this moment, this kiss,  _them_.

She’s allowed to share his room - though they insist she have her own bed - and later, when Gina comes by to check on them, she finds them both sound asleep, hands linked in the gap between their gurneys.


	6. hello kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Hello kisses:_ After long periods apart, these can include A picking up B and spinning them around. Fingers pressing into cheeks, palms cupping necks, and breathless laughs when they finally come up for air.

Jake waits as long as he can stand it after he hears the front door open.

Right away it’s obvious that she’s exhausted, based on the heavy sigh she heaves and the way her duffle bag seems to hit the ground hard. She’s exhausted, as she should be after a full week in Kansas interviewing a series of witnesses about the murder case she’s been working for the last month or so. She’s exhausted from whatever crappy motel she stayed in, from whatever hell in the form of Kansas public transportation she endured, from the literal unholy nightmare that is JFK and the long drive home.

He waits as long as he can, because she’s earned a minute to let the comfort of home wash over her without him barging up into her space.

So, he waits about five seconds.

“Ames!” he practically shouts as he vaults over the back of the couch. He can hear her chuckling from the entryway, and as he rushes around the corner he finds her grinning broadly. In an instant she’s in his arms, laughing this bright delighted laugh as he sweeps her up off her feet. He’s laughing too, though his is muffled into her shoulder.

He spins on his heel just to draw out her laughter, and when her feet touch the ground again he wastes no time swooping down and kissing her hard. His eyes are closed and her fingers splay over his cheeks and jaw and curl around the back of his neck, holding him closer. Their feet shuffle a bit awkwardly until he feels the wall bump into his shoulders, and her responding giggle buzzes against his lips.

He reaches up clumsily to touch her neck, his thumbs brushing against her jaw, smothering her mounting laughter with quick kisses against her parted lips. “Ja-” he cuts her off with another kiss, one that isn’t quite strong enough to stop her bright laughter. Her hands quickly slide from his face to his shoulders, using the leverage of him already being pressed against the wall to shove herself backwards. “ _Jake_ ,” she’s still laughing only this time he can see her whole face, the way it glows with love and affection. “What has gotten into you?”

“What?” he openly marvels at her, his hands stroking lightly down her arms and up her sides. “Can’t a dude be super stoked that his wife is finally home?”

She pretends to ponder it, not quite able to fully wipe her own grin away, before her hands slide back up into his hair. “I guess that’s okay,” she murmurs before pulling him forward to meet her with another kiss. This one is slower, more tender, and if his heart wasn’t already fluttering at the sheer intimacy of the act it definitely is when she releases a slow, relieved sigh through her nose pressed against his cheek.

“Mm,” he hums when she pulls away. “M’glad you’re home. It’s super boring here without you.”

“ _Die Hard_  every day just doesn’t do it for you anymore, huh, champ?”

“Obviously not since I now know what  _Die Hard_  while making out on the couch with you is like.”

She tilts her head back and laughs and he hugs her closer, grinning when she buries her face in his neck. She stays there even after she stops laughing. “I missed you, too. For the record.”

“Enough to want to watch  _Die Hard_  and make out with me on the couch?”

She heaves a sigh and shakes her head, before pulling back and looking him in the eye. “This better be the best make out of your life, Peralta.”

“Every single one of my make outs is my best make out, Santiago-Peralta. I’m like a fine wine, okay? I only get better with age.”


	7. in the dark kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In the dark kisses:_ The movie plays in the background, but A and B are hardly paying attention from the back row. They kiss soundlessly, long and soft, fingers locked. A’s arm is thrown behind B’s seat, wrist bent to curl their fingers into B’s hair.

In truth, had Amy known the evening would have ended this way, she probably would have fought a bit harder to just stay home. That’s what she wanted to do in the first place - she so very rarely wants to be anywhere but home when they only have one night off in a week like this. At home, it’s perfectly acceptable to be in pajamas. At home, the snack food is healthy and a lot less expensive.

At home, they don’t typically have to worry about being arrested for public indecency.

She completely, totally, fully blames her husband.

She’d only relented on wanting to stay home because Jake seemed so intent on wanting to go out on a proper date for the first time since their wedding, and he’d hit her hard with this big wide pleading puppy dog eyes. And really, she’d thought, how wrong could dinner and a movie really go?

Horribly wrong, apparently.

It started at dinner with a seemingly innocent touch that lingered just a beat too long on his knee beneath the table. The reality of the situation is that she’d merely been trying to get leverage to scoot a bit closer to him in the booth - she hadn’t even meant to grab him, perse. But she did, and when she’d glanced up at him she’d immediately caught the mischief in his eyes.

From there she found herself an unwilling competitor in a contest she herself started.

He makes his move during dessert, grazing his hand down her back in a familiar move. She shoots him a smile, distracted by the mouth-watering scent of the chocolate lava cake on the plate between them - and then nearly shrieks in surprise when he snaps her bra strap against her back. The squeak she does release is almost inaudible over the sounds of the restaurant. He’s grinning when she turns toward him, and just like that, the sense of competition flares to life in her gut to drown out the heat flushing her face.

“It’s on.” she mutters over her shoulder on their way out of the restaurant.

Out on the sidewalk, she hip-checks him before grabbing his hand, and to an outsider it might just look like they both had one too many glasses of wine.

He makes his next move a few blocks later, dropping her hand to sling an arm around her waist. She lets him pull her a little closer, warily watching his other hand - which is what makes the hand brushing against her hip suddenly smacking against her butt that much more surprising.

A new wave of determination washes over her; she waits until they’re in line at the theater to deftly slide her hand into his back pocket, made loose from his wallet being extracted to pay for their tickets. She waits until there’s only one person ahead of them in line before she squeezes - and when he jumps in surprise, she snorts.

“You’re so dead,”  he murmurs playfully, kissing the shell of her ear before stepping up to the ticket terminal.

They take their seats with drinks and popcorn in hand, and after a few minutes Amy forgets the about the competition, settling into the easy and comfortable rhythm of conversation. They’re seated on the furthest row back and slowly, the seats before them begin to fill up; by the time the lights lower and the previews begin to play, there are only a few empty seats left.

He wastes very little time after that.

His arm is already draped around the back of her chair, the armrest between them pushed up to eliminate the barrier, and as the second preview starts she can feel his fingers worming through her hair to curl against the back of her neck. She closes her eyes and shakes her head and he huffs out a laugh through his nose and then his curled fingers press a bit harder into her neck, like he’s trying to push her closer to him.

She leans closer willingly.

She supposes the movie must start at some point but she can’t be sure - all she knows is the slow, languid, soft movements of his lips against hers. It’s electrifying, so addicting, the best feeling in the world - and suddenly she forgets why she’s supposed to be fighting this, forgets the contest and the people around them and really anything aside from Jake and the way he lights all her senses on fire with a simple kiss.

Or, a…not so simple kiss.

She has no idea how long they spend like that, so tied up in each other and this moment, but she knows the second it ends - with a blinding light in their eyes and a throat clearing pointedly.

They jerk away, squinting up at the source of the light - and the light suddenly shuts off. “Oh,” a voice above them says, and as Amy blinks the spots in her vision clear enough to reveal a wiry-looking security guard staring down at them a bit sheepishly. “Sorry about that,” he murmurs quietly. “I thought - uh, we got a complaint about teenagers making out back here.”

Amy stares, and behind her, Jake snickers.

“I’m sorry, folks, but I’m gonna have to ask you to leave,” he says with a bit more conviction. “You really can’t do that stuff in here.”

“Sorry,” Amy mutters, reaching back blindly until Jake catches her hand in his.

“That was hilarious,” Jake declares once they’re safely inside his car again.

“That was  _humiliating_ ,” Amy corrects, exasperated. “We got kicked out of a theater for acting like horny teenagers, Jake!”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you couldn’t keep your hands off me at the restaurant -”

“I can’t stand you - you know I was reaching for the edge of the booth, there’s no way I’d try to cop a feel in public like that -”

He cuts her off with a loud laugh and she huffs and rolls her eyes, turning her head to stare out her window at the scenery passing by in a blur outside. His laughter tapers off, and the car settles into silence.

“Hey,” Jake says softly. They’re at a red light; when she turns to look at him he’s thrown into a soft red glow from the light ahead of them. “I know neither one of us really won, but…I had a lot of fun being mistaken as teenagers with you tonight.”

She smiles, and then takes the hand he’s offering her over the console. He smiles and leans toward her, and she meets him in the middle for a soft, chaste kiss.

And when the light turns green and he settles back into his seat, she squeezes his hand. “I had fun too,” she murmurs, “but next time I’m totally gonna kick your ass.”


	8. breathless kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Breathless kisses:_ A series of short pecks because they need the closeness but they also need air, so. Sometimes smiles come in between, or sometimes its just breath, gasping for the sole purpose of being able to kiss again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: description of near-drowning and mentions of stomach pumping (y’know standard breathless kiss prompt stuff)

In the minutes after Amy almost drowns, Jake can’t seem to remember how to breathe. Everything happens so fast - his senses only absorbing things in blurred, choppy, disconnected pieces - but he does know that his lungs only fill with oxygen when hers do. Their perp comes stumbling out of the water first but Jake only has eyes for Amy; he practically shoves the guy at Rosa and Charles in his haste to get to the water’s edge.

Amy crawls back onto land. And it’s as she’s coughing and sputtering, her head hanging low and her hands and knees digging into the soft earth along the edge of the river, that he remembers breathing for the first time since she’d fallen in almost five minutes earlier.

In the hours after Amy almost drowns, Jake splits his time between the ER’s nurses station and the covered porch just outside the automatic sliding doors. In truth he’s only outside for a cumulative ten minutes, stepping out only when Rosa or Charles call with an update. He spends the rest of that time pestering the nurses or else twisting his wedding band around his finger, trying not to think about the amount of discomfort his wife is in as the doctors pump that nasty water out of her stomach.

She emerges some three hours later looking exhausted and clad in the spare clothes he pulled from the go-bag in the trunk of her car, her hair tied back in a messy ponytail, eyelids drooping. Jake all but rushes to her the moment she’s in the waiting room but forces himself to stop, to be gentle, to let her reach for him and dictate how long and soft this reunion hug will be. And when she pulls away and gestures wordlessly to the doors he takes her hand, her left hand, and squeezes just hard enough to feel her rings dig into the flesh between his fingers.

Exactly seven hours and forty-two minutes after Amy almost drowns, they finally make it back home. He steers her toward the couch the minute the front door closes and she goes without a word, stopping only to kick her shoes off by the rack they built together the day they got back from their honeymoon. She falls heavily into the cushions and closes her eyes, letting him move her and shift her around until her work pants and blouse are gone and her favorite blanket is draped over her. A quick detour to their bedroom after that, rummaging through her drawers to grab socks and a worn, comfortable-looking t-shirt, and then through his to grab the flannel pajama pants she loves to steal, and then he’s back by the couch quietly urging her to sit up so he can redress her.

Once she’s resituated and dozing off he heads to the kitchen, moving quickly and expertly around cabinets and drawers until the kettle is heating up on the stove top and the chicken pot pie is warming in the oven. He ventures back out into the living room while he waits, switching the TV on and turning the volume down low, double checking the blanket is tucked tight around her feet before adding a second one for good measure.

She snuffles in her sleep.

He gets the tea poured and the pot pie baked to perfection, and it’s just as he’s carefully transferring two even slices over to the plates he’d pulled down from the counter that he finally hears movement in the living room.

“Ames,” he says softly as he heads toward the kitchen door, intending to head her off and shoo her back to the couch. “Lay down, babe, I’ll be right there -”

She’s moving faster than he anticipated and when they collide he nearly loses his balance, stumbling backwards until the edge of the door frame rams painfully between his shoulders. Her arms are flung tight around his neck and she’s kissing him over and over again, gasping desperately between each kiss, fingers wound tight in his hair to hold him in place. His hands flutter over her sides before flattening there, resolving to scold her for not taking it easy like the doctors warned her after she’s gotten her fill.

He can’t even really blame her for being so desperate - god knows he was desperate for just this eight hours and thirteen minutes ago - but he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t feel so on-edge about this if she was just a little less breathless.

“Hon- _mm_ ,” she cuts him off before he can even form the word, hands sliding down from the back of his head over his ears to his face, resolute. “ _Amy_ ,” he finally gasps between kisses.

She goes in for one more before pulling back, her chest heaving, her face tinged an attractive shade of pink. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” she murmurs almost shyly, eyes so big and wide and piercing straight through to his soul. “I needed you.”

His hands are splayed along her back and he slides one up, to the back of her neck, pulling her in for a longer, more lingering kiss. When they part they’re both breathing heavily; he keeps his eyes closed, letting his forehead rest against hers, savoring this feeling. “That was so scary,” he finally whispers, and her grip on his jacket ripples and tightens.

They retreat to their couch, tea and pot pie in hand, and when her mug and plate are both empty Amy falls asleep with her head on Jake’s chest. And her breath his warm and even where it gently billows across his heart.


	9. "you look beautiful" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You look beautiful” kisses:_ Just a soft press of lips to the temple, resting them there for a moment, then smiling down and telling them as much.

Morning begins sharply at 3:03 AM to the sounds of little feet pattering down the hardwoods out in the hallway and high-pitched, girlish giggling muffled through the walls. Exhaustion clings to every fiber of his body but that doesn’t stop a small, tired smile from blossoming across his face.

His daughters are, as predicted, far too excited to sleep.

Through the darkness still shrouding their bedroom he can hear Amy still deep in the confines of her sleep, the sounds of their daughters up and moving apparently not quite loud enough to break through her subconsciousness. Guilt twinges preemptively in his gut, knowing any moment now Rae and Ana will be pushing the door open and whisper-shouting to each other about seeing if mommy and daddy are awake yet - a full eight hours of sleep seems like an impossible dream tonight, and Amy needs every last minute she can get.

A particularly loud giggle from the bedroom right beside theirs - Rae’s - seems to finally rouse Amy. “ _Mm_ ,” she grunts, turning her face further into her pillow, a crease appearing between her brows.

“They’re up,” Jake murmurs a bit hoarsely, and Amy blows out a long breath through her nose.

“Five more minutes,” she mutters, clutching her pillow a little tighter.

The giggling is getting louder and now there’s a spastic bumping against the wall, one that suggests a four- and two-year-old jumping on a bed together - and his parental instincts kick in, overpowering the urge to pretend he can’t hear them, to steal just a little bit more sleep.

“They jumpin’?” Amy breathes.

“Yeah,” he’s already sitting up, rubbing his palms over his face, kicking his legs out from the side of their comforter so as not to yank it down off of Amy. “I got ‘em.”

“We agreed to five last night,” Amy mumbles, hiking the comforter up higher. “Arrest them.”

“I’ll throw ‘em in baby jail,” Jake says over his shoulder as he lumbers toward their closed bedroom door.

The laughter is louder in the hallway but it cuts off sharply when his weight makes that one loose board in the hallway squeak; he pauses, listening intently, waiting until he hears Rae’s voice.

“I think he’s gone,” Rae whisper-shouts.

He laughs to himself before stalking forward across the remaining distance and throwing the bedroom door open. “Well, well, well,” he says as theatrically as he can, biting back a grin as his daughters shriek in surprise and laughter. “What do we have here?”

Rae scrambles up to the head of her bed, dragging Ana along with her, so Jake steps toward the foot of the bed and grabs the foot board to lean over it, almost lunging at the girls.

“Looks to me like we got two little girls who don’t know how to tell time.” Jake murmurs, reaching one hand forward to pinch at Ana’s exposed toes.

“Nuh-uh, I’m a big girl!” Rae shouts, and Jake winces at the volume, knowing Amy’s probably using his pillow to cover her ear and smother out the sound as much as possible. “An’, an’ I knew it was too early, so I told Ana we had to stay in here ‘til the big hand went to twelve and the little hand went to five like mommy said last night -”

Ana’s still giggling almost uncontrollably, the tight ringlet curls she inherited from him sticking to her face, which is somehow always sticky (another trait she inherited from him). Jake grins at her and lunges, this time actually grabbing her toes - and her screeching laughter has him regretting the move instantly.

He straightens up, surveying his daughters, knowing in his heart of hearts that they’re far too wired to stay stationary for two more hours.

“Alright, ladies,” Jake waves them forward and they crawl toward him at once, Ana moving a bit slower than Rae but somehow overshooting and very nearly slipping into the space between Rae’s mattress and foot board. She probably would have face-planted into the wood, too, if not for Jake scooping her up and balancing her on his hip. “Easy, tiger,” he tells her, and she laughs as she grabs at his nose. “I’ll make you both a deal - if you can be very quiet and very gentle, we can go back to the bedroom and very politely ask mommy if we can open presents early.”

Rae’s eyes have doubled in circumference and Ana’s grip on the neck of his shirt has tightened significantly, so he offers his free hand to Rae to help her off the bed and holds it as they tip-toe back down the hallway toward the partially-opened bedroom door.

Rae drops his hand the moment they’re inside, bounding up to the bed and leaping up on his side with the kind of dexterity he only ever dreamed about. “Easy, Rae, remember? You have to be gentle.” Jake warns her.

Rae’s crawl toward Amy is decidedly slower, her movements controlled and precise as Jake gently drops Ana onto the mattress where his shoulders usually press. “Mommy, can we open presents now?” Rae whispers, gently shaking Amy’s shoulder.

Amy’s eyes stay closed, but an almost imperceptible smile twitches across her face.

“Hey, Rae,” Jake whispers, crouching down beside the mattress. “It’s not polite to just ask to open presents first thing. Why don’t you try saying Merry Christmas first?”

Rae nods, and then turns back to Amy. “Good morning, mommy,” she says, and Jake feels his heart swell with affection. “Merry Christmas.”

This time Amy’s smile is broad, and when she opens her eyes she immediately reaches to pull Rae into an awkward, sideways hug. “G’morning, sweetheart,” Amy sighs, before reaching to squeeze Ana’s chubby leg. “Merry Christmas.”

When Rae pulls back she’s sporting a perfect replica of Amy’s grin, if a little more manic. “Can we open presents now?”

“Is that how we ask for what we want?” Amy asks, a single brow arched.

“Can we  _please_ open presents now?”

Amy pretends to consider it for a moment, briefly meeting Jake’s gaze, before she reaches out to ruffle Rae’s hair. “We can,” she confirms, and Rae practically bounces off the mattress in her excitement. “Okay, but hang on, we need to go all at the same time - It won’t be fair for Ana if you get to see everything first -”

Rae bounds off the bed and down the hallway, and from his place beside the mattress he can hear her come to a hard stop at the end of the hall, just one corner between her and the Christmas tree.

“Hold onto Ana, Rae,” Jake calls as he lowers Ana to the ground, watching her totter off down the hall toward her sister before rounding the bed to Amy’s side. “Mommy,” he says with a nod.

“You’d think after Hanukkah they’d want to sleep in a little,” she mutters as she struggles to roll to her other side.

“You forget they’re half-me, Ames - there is no sleep when presents are involved.”

She huffs out a laugh at that, head falling back to the pillow beneath her, before reaching up to grab both of his hands. “As much as I’d love to put a hundred percent of the blame on you -” she pauses, breath held and face contorted as he pulls her to her feet, lingering as much as she’ll let him to ensure she doesn’t topple over one way or the other. “That just gets harder and harder every day,” she mutters once the tenseness has dissipated and he’s able to take a step back from her. “Anyways, as much as I’d love to fully blame you, I can’t. I was just as bad when I was a kid.”

“Eh,” he shrugs, “you kinda had to be. You had all those brothers to compete with.”

“Presents weren’t like seconds at dinner, Jake, we didn’t have to fight over the gifts our parents literally allocated to each of us -”

“I love when you use big words this early in the morning.” he interrupts with a sly grin, which earns him a punch to the shoulder and an affectionate smile. “Hey - Merry Christmas, babe.”

She smiles into their kiss, wobbling a little until he grabs her arms, but when he pulls away she’s still smiling serenely. “Merry Christmas,” she murmurs back.

He shoots her a smile and then drops to his knees, hands moving from her arms to her rounded belly. “Merry Christmas, Pecan,” he says before he plants a kiss just over her belly button.

“Peanut was cute with Rae, and I could get on board with Cashew for Ana, but  _Pecan_? Really? Is there no other nickname you could’ve given our son?”

“We’re, like, eight-and-a-half months into this one, Ames, it’s a little late for a nickname change.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. I look like a whale right now.”

“ _Mommy_!  _Daddy_!” Rae shrieks from down the hall before Jake can respond.

Slowly, with his arm around her waist and her hand clasped in his, they hobble down the hallway toward their overly-hyper daughters. “Alright,” Amy says once they’re ahead of the girls, halfway between the hall and the living room where the gifts are displayed, “go ahead.”

Rae tears past them and rushes into the room, her voice loud and delighted and filling up the room. Ana totters in after her, and if Rae’s voice didn’t reach the corners Ana’s laughter does; within seconds, ripped wrapping paper is flying through the air and warmth is blossoming in Jake’s chest.

Amy leans into him a little more, clearly already exhausted from being on her feet, but when Jake tries to buffet her forward to claim a spot on the couch she stays still. “Just for another second,” she whispers.

So he smiles and gently squeezes, before turning his head to press his smile against her temple. Her thumb sweeps out across the back of his hand where it’s flattened against her hip.

And when he pulls away he cranes his neck down to catch and hold her gaze, watching the love flickering there for a brief moment. “You look beautiful,” he murmurs, and the love in her eyes is a roaring wildfire.


	10. "we can't do this" kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“We can’t do this” kisses:_ Fists clenched, hands shoved into pockets. Brows low or brought together, jaws clenched. A feeling like a magnetic pull between them. Their foreheads press together, their lips brush, just barely, until B pulls away with a shaking exhale, forehead dropping into A’s neck.

From where he stands in the shadowy back corner of the evidence lockup, the world seems a lot smaller and more simple than it feels. He can’t see the bullpen or the squad, or anything, really, beyond the wall of cardboard boxes labeled in his own messy scrawl towering up over his head to his left. He can’t see his desk, or his blank computer screen, or his messenger’s bag tipped over beneath his desk, or the half-finished muffin he’d bought himself this morning on his way into work sitting forgotten on the corner of his desk. He can’t see Captain Holt or Charles or Rosa or Terry, or Gina or Hitchcock or Scully or that one beat cop whose name he can never remember but who always smiles and nods in greeting when they pass each other. He can’t see Agent Haas or the half-dozen FBI agents under her lead moving efficiently through the precinct, their sole purpose erasing even the smallest imprint of him from the place.

Most importantly - most  _painfully_ \- he can’t see Amy.

He knows without looking that the incoming texts making his phone buzz are from her - probably worried about the fact that he’d gone missing about three seconds after they got back here from Shaw’s - but he just can’t bring himself to look. Because looking makes this whole nightmare real. Looking means accepting that this is happening, that he’s about to have to put his entire life on hold for god only knows how long.

Looking means acknowledging that she won’t be able to go with him.

He just needs a few more minutes alone. A few more minutes to process this.

He almost groans when the lockup door squeaks open.

But then he notes the clicking heel against the tile floor sounds like that of a thick, sensible boot - the kind that she lines up neatly along the rack on her closet floor at the end of every work day - and he holds his breath, torn between longing and dread.

She rounds the corner slowly and pauses there, arms crossed loosely over her front, leaning into the shelving unit. There’s understanding and sadness alike in her big brown eyes, and Jake hates Jimmy Figgis more than anyone in the entire galaxy for forcing him to put it there.

“Hey,” she says softly, so softly, on the fluttering wings of a heavy exhale.

“Hi,” he says back - and his voice is rusted nails on shattered glass.

“I thought I might find you here,” the corner of her mouth twitches up - and his heart shatters into billions of tiny pieces, everything in him aching for that night a year ago when their biggest problem was a crooked political promotion and their own stubbornness.

He drops his head, willing the tears welling up in his eyes to dissipate. “Yeah,” he finally says once he’s certain he can speak rather than just sob. “It’s, uh - my happy place. Or whatever.”

From his peripheral he sees her stare just a moment longer before casting a glance around. “Your happy place is the room where murder knives are stored?” she asks, pointing to a box between them.

He laughs, and keeps laughing, and suddenly he’s leaning almost all of his weight against the shelves and there are tears pouring down his face and the sounds wrenching out of his chest are desperate and hysterical. There’s something warm and solid pressed against his forehead and a pair of hands drifting from the back of his neck down his arms and back again; slowly, as his awareness comes back to him, he realizes Amy has stepped into his space and has pressed their foreheads together. “I’m sorry, Jake,” she whispers, and he shakes his head as much as he can without losing contact with her.

“I d-don’t wanna g- _go_ ,” he hiccups, catching Amy’s hands and squeezing them tightly. He screws his eyes shut and clenches his jaw and shakes his head again, trying to draw in on himself, to shrink down into a ball of nothingness that only Amy can communicate with. “I don’t, I  _don’t_ -”

“I don’t want you too, either,” Amy says tearfully, and another wave of emotion washes over him at the obvious pain in her voice. “But you have to, Jake, it’s the only way you’re gonna be safe -”

“I don’t - I don’t wanna l-leave,” he inhales, lungs shuddering, and squeezes her hands even harder. “I wanna stay right here forever. He can’t find me here.”

He clenches his jaw, bracing himself for Amy’s gentle-but-logical reasoning for why he has to go - but it never comes. What does come is her quiet, uneven exhale, and the gentle pressure she returns to his hands, and the movement of her head turning just slightly.

And then all he’s feeling is the warm, soft brush of her lips against his.

It’s not quite the kind of lingering kiss they most often share, or the quick pecks before work or the passionate displays after they go on dates. This one is new; it’s softer, more gentle, more tender.

Like a physical manifestation of her telling him she loves him  _so much_.

It’s over far too soon - but when her forehead falls away and all that connects them are their clasped hands, Jake feels a supernatural kind of calm ripple through him.

“We’re gonna be okay,” she tells him softly - and for the first time that night, he believes her. “You’re gonna go somewhere safe with Captain Holt, and I’m gonna stay here with the squad and we’re gonna find Figgis and put him away  _forever_.” He opens his eyes and she’s gazing up at him earnestly, her conviction a roaring wildfire in her eyes. “This  _will not_ break us.”

He believes every word she says, absorbing them and clinging to them with all the strength he has. 

And six months later, after she punches him and shoots him in a span of about four hours, he’s finally able to cling to something so much better - Amy herself.


	11. after sex kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _After sex kisses:_ Lazy, slow presses. Limbs pressed together, chests heaving. Soft murmurs about what to do for dinner later, fingers trailing down backs, tracing lazy patterns. B rolling onto their back and A trailing their lips down their neck, kissing their shoulder, their chest, anywhere they can think of, memorizing B.

After the sweat has cooled and his heartbeat has slowed to a pace slower than  _hummingbird on crack_ , Jake finds his voice again. “So,” he murmurs, “we broke a rule.”

Amy’s arm is flush against his, so close he can feel the smile spreading across her face - Amy Santiago is in his bed. “Yeah,” she breathes, and from the corner of his eye he sees her turn her head toward him. “Hope it wasn’t a mistake.”

Two hours ago that might have been cause for a full-on spiral into anxiety, but now he almost laughs - if something that stupid-good could be classified as a mistake, he never wants to be right about anything ever for the rest of his life. So he turns toward her, feeling his face folding into a smirk. “’Hope it wasn’t a mistake,’ title of your sex tape.” It’s as he’s saying it that the most wonderful thought of all occurs to him; with a gasp, he turns his face back toward the ceiling, and says, “title of  _our_ sex tape!”

It’s not the first time he’s said it to her, but it is the first time it’s actually been accurate. It’s also the first time she actually laughs in response - a quiet, delightful little laugh, something like a giggle. It occurs to him that this might be the very first time he’s ever heard Amy giggle.

In an instant, it has become his life’s purpose to hear it directed at him again.

“You were - I mean, this was - um,” she trails off, and when he turns his head back toward her she’s no longer looking him in the eye. Everything about her is smaller somehow, more timid; in the recesses of her eyes, he sees self-doubt swirling. Talk of rules echoes like a distant memory in his head, and for a moment the temptation to follow her down that path is overwhelming.

“Hey,” her eyes flick up to his face - and his heart does this weird little swelling skip thing in his chest at the vulnerability bald-faced trust he sees there. “How ‘bout we just…pretend for tonight? We’re not Jake and Amy, we’re…we’re Gerard and Pam, who don’t have any rules and do whatever they want without worrying about the consequences.”

She studies his face for a long moment - long enough that he’s almost certain she’s about to shoot him down and leave (and hell if the thought of her leaving now doesn’t make him want to get down on his knees and beg her to stay) - but then a slow, shy smile blossoms across her features. “Okay,” she murmurs, and a thrill runs through him. “I’m having a  _lot_ of fun on our date, Gerard.” 

“Best date I’ve been ever been on, Pam.”

They both laugh, and then she rolls to her side and with a bit of adjustment she’s laying curled against him in the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder and her arm draped over his middle and her legs tangled with his. And his heart is  _soaring_.

The position offers him the entire expanse of her back, stretching on like a blank canvas beneath his fingertips, so while he covers her wrist and the back of her hand with his right hand, with his left he traces all manner of lazy masterpieces into her skin. Every part of him in contact with her tingles with warmth and electricity, like the aftershocks of what they just did are only just now hitting him.

But somehow it’s the press of her lips against his shoulder that is the most disarmingly intimate thing about their current embrace. His breath catches in his throat as she shifts closer and lifts her head - all to get a better angle. Over and over again in a slow, sweet line, she kisses her way across his shoulder and chest and then up his neck to his jaw. He knows she can feel how board-stiff he’s gone but he can’t help himself - one false move and she might just up and leave.

This, of course, proves to be false the moment she presses a slow, lingering kiss to the corner of his mouth; in an instant he angles his head and kisses her hungrily, a low sound of desperation escaping his throat as his hands slide up her arm and back and into her hair.

And later, after she’s fallen asleep with her head on his chest and a leg thrown haphazardly over his, Jake finds himself fighting a losing battle against sleep. But still, he struggles on, desperate for one more minute - one more second - of this moment. Suspended in history, frozen in his mind; no pretending or ignoring or unspoken agreements. Just him, just her - just  _them_ , together at last.


	12. "i almost lost you" kisses (version 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I thought I lost you” kisses:_ The breath is knocked out of both of them with the force that they collide with. Hands grip the back of t-shirts and palms are pressed up and under shirts, holding them close, feeling the warmth of their skin. Palms are pressed to cheeks, thumbs swiping away tears until their mouths collide messily, the world seeming to disappear around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: originally, the asker requested dying kisses, but because i took a vow to never kill off any main characters i couldn't do it. so instead i did "i almost lost you" kisses for a second time :)

The human body can withstand losing anywhere from three to four pints of blood before loss of life. That’s 30-40% of the total volume in an average-sized human’s body. Nearly half.

The waiting room is quiet - mostly - and aside from the occasional nurse or doctor passing by, Amy is alone. The waiting room is spacious, lined with worn, nearly-identical plastic chairs all bolted to the ground, and on the other side of the room there’s a large, dated television mounted to the wall, a telenovela playing muted on the dusty screen. It’s colder than she would have preferred it to be and as she sits with her elbows on her knees and her eyes trained on the floor some three feet in front of her, she finds herself wishing for her husband to drape his hoodie over her shoulders the way he always does when it’s just too cold.

He doesn’t. He can’t. Because his hoodie is probably on the floor in an operating room somewhere, drenched in the same blood that has stained her hands.

Three to four pints. For a split second she feels the more analytical part of her trying to quantify the veritable pool of blood she’d found him laying in before, but she banishes the thoughts, willing them and the nausea they brought with them back into that one dark corner in her compartmentalized mind. He was still breathing, his eyes were still open, and when she’d skidded on her knees to his side and touched face he’d recognized her. His lips, already parted so he could gasp for air, formed the shape of her name.

Everything else in the entire world ceased to matter.

She has no idea what happened to Lugar - the thug responsible for her husband’s three stab wounds - she’d been so out-of-her-mind focused on Jake that she hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard. There’s a part of her hoping that the squad’s absence here in the waiting room is a good sign, but there’s another part of her dreading the alternative, wondering when her phone is going to ring defeatedly, fearing those automatic doors sliding open to make way for another one of her teammates unconscious and bleeding out on a gurney.

She hears herself inhale raggedly, feels the tears falling down her face, feels the uneven edges of her chair digging into her fingers as she reaches down and grips the only solid thing her mind can comprehend as hard as she can.

_Being a cop and dating a cop…it’s harder than I thought it would be._

If she could, she would go back in time and shake her younger self.  _You have no idea_ , she’d scream.  _What you’re feeling is child’s play. Just wait._

_Just wait._

The concept of waiting seems so futile, so utterly devoid of any meaning, because she’s sitting here doing nothing while Jake fights for his life and anxiety gnaws through her stomach lining. Just what the hell is  _there’s nothing more you can do for him right now_  even supposed to mean? Didn’t that stupid nurse know who he is, who they are?

Didn’t that stupid nurse know that man is her whole entire world and she’ll be  _damned_ if she’s not going to do whatever it takes to save him?

Her breaths are coming harder now, more ragged than before, and if Jake was here with her he’d be on his knees in front of her clutching both of her hands and coaching her through the same breathing exercises he’s been coaching her through since the very first panic attack he’d ever witnessed. He’d stay there on her level until she felt calm again, he’d wait until she squeezed his hands before leaning back, he’d wait until she flashed him a weak smile to lean back toward her and plant a quick kiss against her cheek.

But he’s not here, she’s alone and she’s having a panic attack, and she doesn’t even know if he’s still alive or not.

Charles gets there first.

She’s still trembling when he comes rushing through the doors and based on the way he very nearly loses his footing when spots her sitting along the wall to the right of the front doors, he’s dealing with as much frenetic energy as is bristling beneath the surface of her skin. He rushes toward her, winded, panting, eyes so wide they’re nearly bugging out of his head.

She wonders what her appearance gives away.

“Is he - have they -”

“Surgery,” she hears herself rasp, and some cross between relief and anguish ripples through the lines of his face. “Did you guys…?”

“We caught him,” he says grimly, and a similar cocktail of emotions settles over her gut. “He ran fifteen blocks, but Rosa caught up with him halfway up a chain link fence in an alley. She yanked him down so hard he sprained his ankle.”

There’s maybe a small part of her consumed with a savage pleasure at the thought of Jake’s attacker being in some significant amount of pain in some dingy holding cell somewhere.

Charles settles next to her, pulls his phone out of his pocket to check the screen, and then leans back again. His chest rises and falls twice before she sees him turn toward her from her peripheral.

“He’s gonna be fine,” he says timidly.

She can’t quite bring herself to respond.

“He is,” he says, this time with a little more conviction. “He’s not goin’ down that easily, Amy. He loves you too much.”

Believing him would be the weight of the world off her shoulders, but her ever-logical mind is scoffing. “Love can’t fix punctured organs,” she mumbles, the thickest tears yet pouring down her face.

“Don’t you believe in miracles? In the power of true love?”

“I believe that he’d do everything he could to stay if he had a choice in the matter, but he  _doesn’t_.” she says sharply. “This isn’t some fairy tale, I can’t just walk in there and kiss him and have the birds sing or whatever. He was stabbed  _three times_ ,” her voice breaks, her back bows inward, the noose around her neck ever-tightening. She’s so small and insignificant and not good enough. “If they can’t save him - there’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing anyone can do,” she finally mumbles before dropping her head to her hands in complete and utter defeat.

If Charles has a rebuttal, he doesn’t voice it; he lets her cry in silence, his only response coming in the form of his hand on her shoulder, steady and reassuring.

Two more hours pass. The rest of the squad turns up in pieces, some of them murmuring quiet reassurances to Amy, some of them just sitting down in the seats around her in silence. Rosa takes residence in the seat on Amy’s other side and, while she opts for a more silent reassurance, there’s a certain look of calmness in her eyes when Amy meets her gaze.

An exhausted-looking doctor arrives eventually and something inside Amy shifts, like her heart is buckling down for an oncoming storm. When she stands, her squad stands with her.

In truth the doctor’s speech only comes to her in pieces. She catches the phrases “nicked artery” and “missed by centimeters” and feels her heart in her throat; she hears “he’s going to pull through” and feels an explosion of gratitude fill the cavern of her chest all at once.

When she sways on her feet, her squad holds her upright.

She’s not sure if her mind made it up or if she heard someone say it, but he’s awake (or, waking up) and because she’s his wife she’s allowed up to see him, so within minutes she finds herself following the doctor through the winding hospital halls to where her husband, who is very much alive, thank you, is waiting for her. Something big is building inside her and she’s not sure if she’s going to burst into uncontrollable sobs or if she’s going to faint or what; all she knows is that she’s going to scream in frustration if she doesn’t see him alive and well again soon.

He’s laid up in a bed, awake, his expression far too relaxed for someone with so many wires and tubes connected to him, for someone who’s hooked up to so many machines. But his half-lidded eyes track her every move the moment he spots her in the doorway and his handsome face is alight with a loopy kind of smile and when he lifts his arms to reach for her he coos “ _Ames_ ” like she’s the best thing he’s ever seen.

She doesn’t remember shoving past the doctor or racing across the distance between them, but she supposes those things must have happened, for one second she’s seeing him from the threshold and the next she’s practically crawling up onto the bed to bury her face in his neck. The tears are flowing hot and heavy and she’s sobbing, fingers scrabbling through his soft hair, entire body trembling as his hands run clumsily up and down the length of her back.

“S’okay, babe,” he murmurs, the words slurred in her ears. “M’okay, I’m, I’m okay, don’ cry…”

She can hardly catch her breath, and he’s accidentally drawn the back hem of her shirt halfway up her back, but in this moment the only thing she cares about is the fact that he’s  _alive_ , he’s  _alive_ ,  _he’s alive_.

So she yanks her head back from his neck and slides her hands around to the sides of his face and dives toward him, kissing him so hard she can feel it in her bones.

He hums against her and it suddenly occurs to her that she probably needs to be a mite gentler with him but he responds to the movements of her lips enthusiastically (or, as enthusiastically as he can), hand sweeping a broad stroke down the exposed part of her spine. It’s brutal and unforgiving, borderline forceful, but somehow it’s healing everything that is shattered inside her.

She’s still exhaling these quiet sobs when their lips break away so she holds herself close, keeps her forehead tilted down against his and her hands on his face. She sweeps her thumbs across his cheekbones, and they come away wet; whether they’re her tears or his, she’ll never actually know.

Later, once the squad has filtered through and visiting hours have ended, they’re alone save for the occasional pass-through by an overnight nurse to check on his vitals. He’s still laying in the same position as before except for his head, which is turned to face her where she sits on his right. She’s holding his hand in both of hers, tracing each vein across the back of his hand with the tip of her finger, counting each freckle on the skin stretching across his knuckles, dipping her head down to lay kisses on old scars and fresher scabs that disrupt the flowing swirls of his calloused fingers. He’s been quiet, but that’s expected; he never handles anesthesia’s gradual wear-off very well.

“I, um,” Amy stops and clears her throat, feeling his eyes roving over her face, choosing to keep her gaze trained on the raised knuckle of his middle finger she’s currently tracing circles around. “I was, I was…really scared, earlier.”

She hears him swallow, watches his fingers flex around her hand. “Me too,” he admits in a voice just barely louder than a whisper.

She nods, and keeps nodding, and fresh tears prick at her eyes. “I thought I lost you,” she forces herself to whisper.

His fingers tighten even further and he makes a quiet noise in his throat; when she chances a glance up at him, his brows are furrowed and his throat is working. “You're never gonna lose me, babe,” he finally murmurs, and the fracture she sees in his eyes echoes loudly in his voice. "I love you too much, I can't - I _won't_ let go that easy."

“I don’t wanna wait anymore,” she hears herself say, and even though she can see his confusion growing at her words, a sense of complete calm is stealing over her. “I know we said we were gonna wait five years after we got married to start a family, but - but that’s stupid.”

The confusion is dissipating, replaced with caution. “Ames,” he says, his voice choked. “Are you - are you serious?”

She nods, inching forward in her seat, getting as close as the unforgiving metal edge of his bed will allow. “I’m absolutely serious, Jake,” she says, hearing her words tremor and quake with the rhythm of her galloping heart.

“But - but the life calendar -”

“ _Screw_ the life calendar!” she interrupts, and he inhales sharply. “God, Jake, I almost - I mean, we - we can’t waste any more time. We can’t. I love you, and I want to have a family with you, _now_. Well, not _right_ now, but - you know what I mean.” The caution in his face has evaporated - all that remains is a slightly-dopey kind of awe. “If - if that’s okay with you,” she adds haltingly.

“If that’s - is that even a  _question_? Absolutely, god, of  _course_ it’s okay with me, Santiago! Are you  _kidding me_?”

There are still tears streaming down her face but she’s grinning, laughing, her whole body glowing with joy. Her grip around his hand is probably painful, but his isn’t much better; it only loosens up when she stands and leans over him to kiss him, infinitely softer than before.

It’s when she’s back in her seat and gently stroking the back of his hand that his tired grin turns sly. “I know you said not right now, but, um...d'you wanna start trying right now?”

“You already know how I feel about having sex with you while you have stitches, Jake.”

“Well, you’re no fun at all.”


	13. heated kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Heated kisses:_ Breath huffing into mouths, angrily or passionately. Hands grabbing at clothing and pulling each other closer.

There are mornings when Jake can’t seem to speak.

Amy knows to a certain extent that he’s getting better. Step by step, day by day, adjusting and recalibrating and finding a new rhythm to call normal. Sometimes he seems worse one hour than he was the hour before, but overall it’s been a steady incline back to the person he was before the conviction.

But there are days when she isn’t so sure.

Days when she wakes up to find that he’s been out of bed for hours already. Days when she finds him sitting alone in their darkened living room, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, staring at a point on the wall. Days when he responds to her tentative steps toward him with a tightened grip around his coffee mug and a small, almost-imperceptible shudder. Days when the sinews of muscles in his shoulders are drawn in so tight his whole body quivers. Days when he can’t even stand being looked at, let alone touched.

She’s aware on an objective level that the process of healing has a certain cyclical shape, that a bad day isn’t necessarily indicative of a complete regression. But that doesn’t stop the more primal part of her - the part that punched a hole through the drywall in their bedroom the night he was convicted - from absolutely despising the fact that he’s in pain and she can’t help him. She tries not to take it personally when he shrinks away from her but it’s hard, especially when she wants more than anything to hold him close and stroke his hair and remind him in a whisper just how much she loves him until his demons have left him and he releases that slow, familiar sigh against her neck. She hates it, hate that she’s powerless to help him, but she always gives him the space he needs. And she knows, eventually, he’ll come back to her - because he always, always does.

And on this specific Wednesday morning, it starts off a lot like that - she wakes up alone, her hand loosely curled over an empty, cool stretch of mattress, the far corner of the comforter turned down. A faint, watery kind of light is spilling through the thin gauzy curtains hanging over the window behind her, bathing the room in the most faded glow, and a dull kind of acceptance settles over her heart.

She gets out of bed slowly.

The first sign that this morning is not quite like those that came before it comes in the form of their perfectly not-cluttered bedroom floor. Usually she can follow a trail of discarded socks and wrinkled flannels and rumpled blue jeans from his side of the bed out into the living room, but she finds no such trail this morning. She pauses near the foot of the bed, brow furrowed - and all of a sudden she’s aware of the fact that she’s standing on the edge of a thick bubble of tension, one that threatens to swallow her whole should she take one wrong step.

So she takes a deep breath and pushes their bedroom door open.

Movement by the couch catches her eye, and before she can so much as step out into the living room Jake’s quickly lumbering toward her. She has only a split-second’s warning before his hands are on her - one curled around the back of her neck, the other anchoring her to him by the dip of her waist - and then he’s swallowing her gasp in a harsh, searing kiss. She clambers for a grip on his sleeves and stumbles when the weight of his body keeps moving into her, curving down toward her, and very nearly stumbles as his feet keep carrying him forward. She can’t comprehend much beyond the almost rough way he handles her, until her shoulders make sharp contact with the solid surface of her dresser.

He’s desperate and needy, only breaking away to gasp and pant into her mouth. His fingers grasp and pull at the soft material of her sleep shirt, the one she’d stolen out of his drawer all the way back when he was sent off to Florida and he just didn’t have the heart to steal back. He can’t seem to find any one place to hold her; his hands dart from her hair down her back to her hips up her sides over her shoulders to her face and back again, and when he pulls away for another breath of air his inhale is choked and his exhale is ragged.

“Jake -” his name leaves her lips on a whimper - she’s never seen him this intense before - and then he’s kissing her again, more ardently than before, like the sound of her voice spurred him on. A low whine of his own works up from his throat to buzz against her lips, and it’s like his whole body is shaking unless he’s leaning his entire body weight into her.

It’s as he’s whining for a second time, the edges of his teeth nipping hard over her lips, that she finally recognizes this for what it is. And like a flash of light, her sensibility returns to her; her hands move quickly from his biceps to his hair, stroking slowly and steadily in a grounding, soothing rhythm.

He pulls away a moment later, and when he does, something akin to a choked sob escapes his throat.

“It’s okay,” she breathes, not quite trusting her voice yet. “It’s okay, Jake, It’s okay.”

His trembling hands drift from halfway up her back to the taper of her waist and he tilts his head forward and down, forehead thunking against the dresser against which she leans, lips and nose pressing down over the curve of her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and his lips catching and pulling on her shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“Sh,” she turns her head an inch to the left and lets her lips brush against the side of his face, and he quiets down at once. He’s gripping her shirt tightly in both fists and the muscles of his forearms are straining against her sides but slowly, slowly, his chest stops heaving; after only a few minutes, he seems relatively calm again, the damp patch on her shoulder from where his tears soaked into her shirt.

His grip around her never loosens, and her hands never falter in their steady stroke along the back of his head and neck.

“Are you okay?” she asks softly. 

She hears the muscles of his throat ripple and constrict as he swallows, but otherwise he seems to settle a little more fully against her. “Yeah,” he says after a moment, and the word seems to stick to his teeth a little bit. “I’m so sorry, Ames -”

“You have nothing to apologize to me for,” she says gently, and after a moment she feels him nod. “I just…I want you to be okay. I wanna do whatever I can to  _help_ you, so if - if that helps, then…”

Something like a laugh huffs out through his nose, and against her shoulder she feels his lips curving up into a smile. “That  _always_ helps, Ames.”

It’s her turn to laugh - small and quiet - and when he leans back she catches him with a soft touch to the side of his face. “I love you so much, Jake,” she murmurs.

The press of his lips against hers is a much quieter affair now than it was just minutes earlier, but it’s this slow, gentle movement - this tide of intimacy ebbing and flowing between them - that has her knees weak, her brain going to mush. It’s delicate and sweet, and when he pulls away she strains after him subconsciously. “I love you too,” he murmurs as her eyes flutter open, “so much.  _So_ much.”

His voice is a bit more uneven than what she’s used to - a little quieter, a little thinner - but beneath that, way down at his core, he’s still Jake.

It stokes the bud of hope flickering inside her chest.


	14. angry kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Angry kisses:_ Hard, gripping. Fists in clothes, shoving each other against walls. Fingers digging into hips. But the kisses always melt away from that. They turn into brushes of lips between shaking breaths, until they’re out of energy and are left just standing there, holding each other, fingers carding through hair.

Amy gets home first.

Their apartment is quiet and dark - she’d shut off all the lights before leaving that morning, assuming one of them would be home early enough that natural light would illuminate at least a little bit of the living room. When she kicks the front door shut behind her with a bit more force than necessary, the entryway is plunged into near-darkness. She can see the vague outline of their dining room table a few feet to her left and the bluish glow from the nightlight carried over from Jake’s old bedroom plugged into the outlet behind the coffee pot on the kitchen counter casting long, eerie shadows across the ceiling. Lights from the neon signs across the street pour in through the window on the far wall - the one whose curtains hung open for the duration of the day - so with a bitten sigh, Amy lets her purse fall from her shoulder to the floor at her feet with a dull  _thunk_ and she sets across their living room with slow, tired steps.

It would be a little less painful, she thinks, if she maybe took her shoes off - there are warm wool socks in her sock drawer, freshly washed and dried just the night before, calling her name right then and there. It would be a relief on the aching soles of her feet, on the dull pain in her ankles, on the creaking whines of protest from her knees to just kick those three inch heels off and to trot barefoot toward their bedroom. She could go to their closet and peel off these work clothes, stiff with dried sweat, and unwind on the couch in a pair of shorts and one of Jake’s biggest, baggiest t-shirts. She could kick her socked feet up on the coffee table and start working on that puzzle she started last week, or she could finish up the crossword she couldn’t quite complete over breakfast, or she could start in on the unwatched episodes of  _Serve and Protect_  burning a hole in their DVR. It would be a calm respite, a welcome reprieve to the hell that was this day.

Except she doesn’t get a chance to do any of those things. For just as she grasps both curtains in her fists with the intention of pulling them closed, she hears a key turning in the lock, and a familiar set of steps shuffling over the threshold.

When she turns to face him she’s already at the advantage - what scant amount of light is pouring into the apartment is at her back, illuminating his face in a dim, gentle kind of glow. It makes him look older and more weathered - exhausted, maybe, or perhaps enraged - and when he turns to look at her she knows all he’s really seeing is her figure silhouetted against the window.

It’s quiet for a long moment. She can hear the old grandfather clock given to her by her abuelo on the other side of the kitchen doorway ticking steadily. She releases a breath; his messenger’s bag slips from his shoulder and catches in the crook of his arm, before he straightens his arm and lets it fall to the floor, almost on top of her purse.

They charge toward each other at once.

The initial collide is sharp,  _hard_ , unforgiving. He thrusts his tongue into her mouth greedily and his fingertips dig harshly into her hips, wrinkling the silky fabric of her blouse; she matches his ferocity with as much intensity as she can muster, hauling him closer to her with a fierce grip on his shirt over his shoulders, pulling up hard until the tail comes loose from the waistband of his jeans. It’s messy and frantic and bruising, and he steps on her toes more than once in his haste to back her into the wall beside the door. She can hardly feel it over the headiness clouding her mind.

The wall is flat and hard where it collides with her shoulders and it gives her the leverage she needs to fully yank his shirt up his back, higher and higher until her fingers find flesh; she grips along his sides, feeling the faint, unyielding bumps of his ribs and the soft, warm muscles of his abs rippling against her palms. He scrabbles along her waist, pulling at her shirt until he’s gotten it untucked as well - in an instant he’s splaying his fingers as wide as they’ll go along her sides and she’s reminded with startling clarity just how much physically smaller she is compared to him.

It’s strange - she hardly ever feels it in the field. She feels even, equally matched, just as intimidating and space-filling as he can sometimes be; their collars are always as scared of her as they are of him whenever she chooses to make them scared. But here and now, when his anger is as encompassing as hers is, she feels herself craning her neck to meet his kiss, pushing up to the balls of her feet to reach around the broad span of his shoulders, shivering at the realization that his left hand covers practically half of her back.

He pulls away to gasp for air and she holds him at bay with a hand pressed against his chest; his forehead drops to hers and their chests both heave, breaths mingling in the space between them. Her eyes are closed and she focuses on the thump of his heart against her palm - as wild and unruly as her own heartbeat is in that moment - and her other hand drifts up, over the back of his neck and into his curly hair, just a few centimeters too long to be considered cropped anymore.

His answering exhale is a bit shakier than the last and then he’s leaning forward again despite her hand still firmly planted on his chest, only this time when their lips meet there isn’t a single modicum of urgency to it at all. It’s a slow, tender press - an apology of sorts - and it ends after a few seconds. Still, it leaves her breathless and wanting, so she takes advantage of her grip in his hair and tugs him back down again, angling up to deepen it slightly, until she feels the sharp edges of his teeth pressing down against her lower lip.

He doesn’t move any further, though - hardly even brushing her lips with his tongue - and then he’s pulling back again, hands sliding down her sides to cling gently to her hips. His shirt comes unrumpled and falls back down his back, his forehead stays pressed against hers, and his thumbs brush out over her hipbones and he sighs - this big, long, defeated thing - and they both go still.

She listens to him breathe for a few minutes, letting the tides of anger from earlier lap at the very edges of her consciousness, before she heaves a sigh of her own and lets her hands drift from his hair down over his chest and stomach, until her index fingers hook through his belt loops, loosely anchoring him to her.

“Today  _sucked_.”

His words are warm puffs of air against her chin that fall like boulders in her chest - a massive understatement, almost an insult to exactly how shitty the last 18 hours have been. Coming from anyone else it most assuredly would have been an insult, but it’s coming from Jake - the same man who woke up at 5 AM with her to trek across town for that godforsaken witness interview, just to find that witness missing. He’s the one who spent the day with her linking that witness to a string of armed robberies from six months earlier that had gone unsolved - he’s the one who tracked that witness with her through multiple filthy, seedy strip clubs and even an underground brothel straight to their witness’s front door just to have him bolt at the sound of their voices demanding that he open up. He’s the one who chased that witness into an alley where she cornered him and was two words into the Miranda Rights before they heard a familiar, grating voice at the end of the alley.

“ _Thanks, sexy,_ ” the Vulture had smirked, his hands broad and forceful on her witness’s back as he yanked the guy out of her grip and forced him face-first into the grimy building to her left. “ _But I got it from here._ ”

She grits her teeth for a minute, letting the rage overtake her again for just a second, before blowing a long breath out. It leaves her feeling deflated, exhausted, and hollow - like his hands on her hips are the only things keeping her upright. “That’s an understatement.” she murmurs - and her voice is hoarse.

No surprise there, considering she’d gotten in her car and screamed at the top of her lungs the moment she slammed the door behind her in the parking garage at work.

His forehead vanishes against hers, and when her eyes flutter open he’s pulled away completely to study her face. There’s a questioning look in his eyes - a faintly concerned furrow in his brow - but it dissipates after a moment. “Yeah,” he breathes, thumbs still sweeping slow and steady over the curve of her hips beneath her shirt. “A pretty big one.”

She knows he can feel how tired she is because she can clearly feel it in him - but she fights it, fights the urge to kiss him again, the urge to slink off to their bedroom so they can both change into pajamas in silence and fall into the bed without another word. “I’m sorry,” she says, and confusion cracks across the anger in his face like lightening across a stormy sky. “I was lead on this one, so it’s on me that we got  _Vulture’d_ -”

“Babe,” he interrupts, shaking his head vehemently. “There’s nothing - it’s not your fault. Like, at all. I don’t blame anyone but  _him_ , and I know Captain Holt feels the same way. We did the best we could -  _you_ did the best you could - and it was enough. We found him, we had him. It’s not either one of our faults that some lazy buttmuch stole our victory from us. You  _solved this case_ , Ames,” he bumps his forehead against hers and a slow, reluctant smile spreads across her face, one he mirrors encouragingly. “Screw whatever major crimes says. It’s your case, and you solved it, and I’m proud of you.”

She lets herself bask in his praise for a moment, before she huffs out a laugh through her nose. “You’re biased,” she murmurs, gaze drifting to the missing button at the hollow of his throat. “I’m your fiancee.”

“You’re also my best friend and my partner and the primary on this case, so  _yeah_ , I’m  _super_ biased. But I’m only stating facts, babe. You solved the case, and you looked fly as hell doing it, and you’re the best-looking cop on the force - I’m the second-best, in case you were wondering - and you’re the most amazing woman in the whole entire world and I love you more than anything.”

Emotion knots thick and hot in her chest but she chokes it down, focusing on the way his eyes have lit up with that familiar amusement that never fails to make her heart soar. “I can’t wait to marry you,” she softly marvels, and the amusement in his eyes quickly fades to something softer, something more tender. It’s all he needs to hear, apparently - he angles his head down at once, capturing her lips in another soft, gentle kiss that lingers just long enough to make her heart flutter with affection.

“C’mon,” he murmurs when he pulls away. “Let’s change and get in bed, and I’ll give you a massage. Is that okay?”

She can already feel her muscles coming undone with the promise of his warm, steady hands working each and every knot in her back out and she sighs, gently scratching her nails over his scalp. “That sounds absolutely perfect,” she admits, and he flashes her a grin before stepping away and taking her hands to lead her into their bedroom.


	15. first kisses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _First kisses:_ Hesitant and nervous. Lips hover inches from each other for a few seconds before they just barely brush. It’s just a soft press, but it ignites their entire bodies. Pinkies link afterwards, still wanting to be close, and each looks down, smiling softly.

He still hasn’t kissed her yet.

She’s not upset about it, necessarily - he had a lot of frenetic energy coming out of holding, and though he’d hugged her so tightly she literally couldn’t even breathe for a solid ten seconds, he seemed just a little too jumpy to allow for anything more intimate than that.

And that’s okay. She still remembers the soft, exhausted energy that he’d exuded coming home from Florida. He’d needed time and space to acclimate and readjust to New York’s impossible tempo. She can handle it a second time.

(Mostly because handling a slightly distant Jake is  _lightyears_ better than handling the Jake-shaped hole in her heart that gapes wide and raw whenever he’s not around.)

The autumn breeze rolling through their open window is crisp and cool, and the gauzy curtains billow out into the living room as the front door opens. Jake pauses in the threshold, barring Amy from entering - but she doesn’t mind at all.

Not when the tension is visibly draining from his shoulders as he slowly takes in the sight of their home.

“Oh my god,” he breathes, and she smiles, peering up over his shoulder into their living room. She’d left a lamp on the side table on, in case they made it onto that 10PM flight for which she’d gotten standby tickets (they didn’t), and as Jake slowly paces inside she can tell he’s eyeing it curiously.

(She’s never been one to be wasteful when it comes to electricity.)

“Welcome home, Jake,” she says once he’s standing in the center of the living room and she’s hefted their bags up on the chair to her left. He turns to face her with a serene grin on his face that she mirrors instantaneously.

“I missed this place so much,” he says, eyes drifting from her face over their furniture to the tall rack just visible through the open bedroom door upon which his sneakers are neatly displayed. “I missed the doilies and the curtains and the organizational spice rack we never use -”

“I told Charles it was a waste of money -”

“And I missed your smile and your laugh and the way you roll your eyes when I’m being stupid and the way you blush and the way you look at me when I’m being too mushy…” he trails, his gaze now fixated on her face again, and she reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ears. His face, already so soft, softens even further. “And I missed everything about you, Ames. I missed you so much, it felt like I was  _drowning_ without you…”

“Jake,” she says softly, and he comes closer at once, his jaw clenched against the sadness pouring into his expression. “I missed you too - I can’t even put it into words, it was like - like part of me was just gone -”

He’s practically standing on her toes now, so close she feel the heat of him through the dark cotton henley she’d haphazardly grabbed out of his dresser for him to change into the day before, and though she longs to reach across the three-inch chasm between them to draw him in close she finds herself paralyzed beneath his searching gaze. Her words - her heart - are caught in her throat and she can’t bring herself to even draw a breath.

Not when he looks so close to falling apart right in front of her.

“Amy,” her name comes softly from somewhere deep in his chest, just barely louder than a hushed exhale, and as she watches his lips edge closer and closer, until he’s so close her eyes can no longer focus on anything except the blurry mass of color slowly descending toward her.

Her eyes flutter shut as his lips just barely ghost across hers.

He makes a quiet, almost strangled noise in his throat, and then he’s fully kissing her  _finally finally finally_. She feels her exhale escape her chest in a shudder and he’s got his arms around her, firm and steady as he pulls her closer. Her arms have taken on a mind of their own and they’ve curled around the back of his neck to gain leverage - she’s up on the balls of her feet, her entire being literally blossoming up toward him, movements soft and limited in what little space he’s yet to eliminate between them.

Slowly, slowly, she feels herself sinking back down until her heels touch the hardwoods beneath them; though his arms loosen around her and the space between them grows, he doesn’t let her get far. His forehead stays almost insistently pressed against hers, his hands drifting down her arms to her hands. He squeezes gently before their fingers tangle together and his thumbs sweep out over the meaty part of her palm in a gentle, soothing rhythm.

“ _Now_ I’m home,” he murmurs.

Her heart melts to putty right there on the floor between them.


End file.
